Friday, April 20, 2018

Woodland Park Zoo Goes Plastic Bottle Free

Posted by Zosia Brown, Resource Conservation and Sustainability

As plastic waste in our environment becomes an increasingly
important global topic, Woodland Park Zoo is celebrating a milestone in our own
resource conservation journey with the announcement that we are no longer selling
beverages in single-use plastic bottles.

Refill, please! Photo by Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/ Woodland Park Zoo.

Woodland Park Zoo is committed to protecting and preserving
wildlife and habitat for generations to come. It is our role to inspire our zoo
guests and communities across our region to meaningfully reduce their own
impact on the planet. Our Sustainable Zoo Plan guides our own operations
following a Natural Step model that aims to: take no more from the earth that
it can sustainably provide; provide no more to the earth more than it can
sustainably absorb; and eliminate "waste" of all kinds from our
operations, instead viewing waste as a resource.

The zoo as a green oasis in Seattle's Woodland Park. Photo by Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo.

Single-use plastic bottles are highly resource intensive to
produce, transport and refrigerate. Their disposal has a direct impact on
wildlife and habitats, threatening the well-being of animals and disrupting
ecosystems. Although plastic water bottles can be recycled, on average only 1
in 5 bottles make it to a recycling facility.
As many as 30 billion water bottles are disposed of in US landfills each
year, where they take approximately 450 years to break down. Plastic bottles
that do not make it to landfill often end up on our beaches and oceans, where the
debris breaks down into smaller pieces (microplastic) and can be ingested by
marine life, working its way up the food chain.

In Seattle, our tap water comes from one of only a few
pristine, protected mountain watersheds in the country. Together, the Tolt
River and Cedar River represent more than 100,000 acres owned and controlled by
the City of Seattle and the U.S. Forest Service. Every day, Seattle Public
Utilities provides about 120 million gallons of drinking water to 1.4 million
people in the greater Seattle area. With outstanding drinking water readily
available, we are encouraging our guests to join us in ditching the plastic
bottle and tap our greatest resource!

Tolt watershed. Photo via City of Seattle.

To support drinking from the tap, Woodland Park Zoo has over
14 water fountains distributed throughout zoo grounds. We are in the process of
converting several of these to reusable bottle filling stations for those who
prefer to carry water with them. Look for a bottle filling station at our South
Plaza, North Meadow, and Assam Rhino Exhibit.

Zoo staff test out the new water stations. Photo by Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo.

When visiting the zoo, be sure to bring your own reusable
bottle to fill at one of our water bottle filling stations or concessionaires.
If you don’t own a reusable bottle, you can find a range of sizes and options
available for purchase at our ZooStores. Our Rain Forest Food Pavilion and Pacific
Blue Chowder House will sell fountain drinks served in compostable cups instead
of plastic bottled beverages.

In partnership with food concessionaire Lancer
Hospitality and gift shop operator Event Network, Woodland Park Zoo has
eliminated the sale of single-use plastics for beverages including water, juice
and soda.

You may notice that our vending machines have been replaced
with all-can machines, with no pre-packaged water sold. Aluminum cans are viewed as a preferred
alternative to single use plastic bottles or cartons. As a material, aluminum is
infinitely recyclable, recycled most often, recycled locally (within Washington
state – not shipped abroad) and takes as little as 60 days to turn into a new
can or bottle.

As a stepping stone, while we continue to roll out bottle
filling infrastructure, we and our food concessionaire, Lancer Hospitality, have
partnered with Green Sheep, a
small Midwest business, that produces screw-top aluminum bottled water, made
from 70% recycled aluminum content and sourced within the USA. Green Sheep is a
1% for the planet company, which means 1% of each sale comes back to Woodland
Park Zoo to support our field conservation efforts.

2 comments:

Why not install more drinking fountains? I suspect that expense of installation of water fountains, as well as the loss of this new profit center (sale of aluminum bottles) factor into the zoo's rationale. Information below was obtained with a quick Google search. Do you disagree with it? " Making aluminum is harmful to the environment and the people who live near mining, refining, or smelting operations/" " Mining and refining bauxite and smelting aluminum is immensely energy intensive, uses large amounts of water, and generates air, water, and soil pollution" "Mining ores is a dirty destructive process and bauxite mining is no different" If Woodland Park Zoo management really wanted to make a positive impact, they'd install many more water fountains.

The majority of bauxite is surface mined. This requires stripping everything off the surface of the land: trees, shrubs, plants, flowers, animals, top soil, and even rocks to expose the bauxite. Giant excavators dig up the bauxite and huge trucks, rail cars, or conveyor systems transport it to a refining plant.